On the topic of Smith, have Catholics been practising Taqiyya for a while in the build up to the war and since? I don't think we've seen even one Catholic advocate for him politically. His own sect in the US has left him to dry, while Catholic Italy helps try to crush him.
For the Republic: A History of the Second American Civil War
- Thread starter The Angry Observer
- Start date
Catholics having doctrinal fights over progress vs. traditions? When has that ever happened?
More seriously, it's probably a mix of factors that we in the modern US don't think about as much. Remember, this is well before most Hispanic permanent migration into the Southwest and indeed long policies have been in place for decades at this time that have illegally expulsed a lot of Mexican-ancestry citizens on the basis of "not actually being American". This is back in the day where California and Texas were more WASPy than they are now by a long-shot, before the massive flight out of the Midwest and East into the Sun Belt. ITTL at this moment, the majority of American Catholics are in or pretty damn close to Republic territory. Those who are on the wrong side of the Natcorps' plans are suffering directly, those supposedly behind the lines are being targeted to varying degrees and currently trying to keep their heads down or get out if they're smart.
It's also worth noting that Catholics in America never really formed the political monolith that they did in Europe. They weren't the conservative land-holding elite here that used to control the schools and wanted to guard that power, they were a minority group that worked to support its members (and membership if you catch my meaning) that had some very conservative social values but also had a wide divide in politics as to how to do that (not to say Europe didn't: Liberation theology might be a Latin American thing, but the Worker Priests and other movements were wholly European). You had plenty who gravitated towards people like Coughlin who was basically a fascist, but their fascist, while others focused on immigrant economic needs and gradually became Catholic Socialists.
Also, please define Taqiyya for those of us who never spoke Arabic in this case. I'm assuming it's basically excommunication/shunning, but I don't know.
Smith honestly seems a bit like Lincoln, but moreso, at least in one respect (maybe not the inspirational and moral fortitude, we'll see about that). Lincoln was a moderate being pushed into more radical directions as the war went on both by his experiences and congressional pressure, whereas Smith is a conservative who is being forced into the role of progressive champion that he doesn't really believe in but has to act that way, and perhaps he will end up becoming the mask to some extent.
The best metaphor I could give off the top of my head is if you threw Stephen Douglass into Lincoln's shoes and made him preside over the events of the OTL Civil War and deal with those same pressures and somehow survive while still defeating the South through military force. He might end up at a lot of similar solutions, but his is a longer and more difficult journey.
My bad, more the Shiite thing of hiding their faith to avoid persecution given how silent as whole US Catholics have been since he was elected into office even before the civil war began on one of their community got elected into one of the highest offices in the nation.
As in try to blend in with society to avoid standing out and being persecuted for their faith, this case blend in with the rest of the US society calling for Smith's head by staying silent or given how the civil war has began try to look as protestant as possible for self preservation.
Ah, thank you so much! Like I've said before, Smith is a personal favorite of mine. I think he's deeply interesting as a historical figure, and it's been a whole lot of fun to imagine him as one of those leaders that fundamentally remakes the country, especially when thrust in a situation that one wouldn't really expect him to find himself in.
The big irony is that Smith never wanted to hurt anyone and his ultimate ambition was to govern as an economic moderate and deliver prosperity for all. Hurting people like Hearst and Morgan and Ford would've never occurred to him, but they were blinded by greed and bigotry and struck first. Now, he is absolutely committed to destroying them.
I've been told there are a lot of similarities, even though I've personally never played (kind of feel I have to now considering how many people have made the comparison).
The unfortunate truth is I haven't made an update specifically singling them out. However, they are active. It's worth noting that Al Smith's political base is a weird one. OTL, some historians drew the connection between Smith's 1928 coalition (despite losing in a huge landslide everywhere, Smith did surprisingly good in the northeast, becoming the second Democrat since the Civil War to win Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He came very close to winning New York, too.) and FDR's winning New Deal Coalition. Smith, after all, began Democrats' winning streak in big cities like NYC and Boston, which they've kept ever since, even in huge Republican landslide years.
In my opinion, this is misguided. Smith's 1928 voter base was a huge departure from previous Democratic coalitions, but it was also very different from Roosevelt's. Roosevelt's worst performances were actually in states Smith did comparatively good in. Smith did very good in the Northeast, with New York voting around 16 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole, but was still five points to the left! Smith came close to winning Connecticut, which was one of the few states to back Hoover in 1932, while Massachusetts and Rhode Island both became much more Republican in 1932.
The point in all of this is that OTL Smith is a big anomaly. His base is urban and Catholic. The role of these voters in the Republic right now is continuing to support him, locking down a power base that might not feel like much but which literally saved him during the trial. In other places, of course, they are being persecuted, something that I need to cover but haven't because it's a big can of worms to open. Definitely need to in the near future though.
Worth noting-- 1928, Smith's only ITL election, was weird partially because it was singly twisted around his religion. As a consequence, Smith did really good with Catholic voters everywhere, whether that was Irish immigrants in New York City that fled the Democrats due to Wilsonian Anglophilia or Catholic farmers in North Dakota. To create the map at the beginning of the thread, I didn't do anything to the 1932 one and only tweaked with 1928. Herbert Hoover's strongest showing was in the west, which is highly Protestant and geographically alien to Smith. The west swung massively for Roosevelt, thanks to his sweeping promises of change and his own personal appeal to that region. Smith is anathema to it and is promising more urban-oriented reformism.
Smith's 100% sincere in his desire to win the war at all costs. He isn't nationalizing Morgan's banks because he likes taking things from rich people, he's doing it because he sees it as the best way to save the country. Weirdly enough, he's now been tasked with destroying a pretty big segment of corporate America's moneyed elite, not because he wanted to, but because they forced his hand. The country he is leading is also fundamentally a leftist one, so if he's going to try and act in its best interests he'll naturally end up making policy decisions that he wouldn't otherwise.
I really like the Douglas analogy, and now I kinda want to see a TL like this. I remember reading a very well done article that suggested Lincoln's wartime policies mirrored the way the average white federal soldier thought about the war. The median Union soldier didn't want slavery abolished, but slavery struck first. As the war ground on, many gradually came to realize that it was the enemy and had to be destroyed.
Not sure if I'll be able to have the next update done by Monday. There's still a lot left to be done, and now I'm even busier than before. Sorry everybody.
No problem, thanks for explaining. The author already clarified this, but I think my point is still relevant: those who are not in Natcorp territory are virulently opposed to the Natcorps, while those stuck behind the lines are keeping their heads down and not advertising their faith, in other words practicing Taqiyya as you mention. That might change as battle lines shift.
I'll admit I'm not an expert on the 1928 campaign, but this tracks with what I do know. Catholics were an urban and Northeast/Midwest constituency back in the day outside of a small portion of farmers. Even my own ancestors, despite being farmers, were relatively small landholders in very close proximity to "major" cities in their region and pretty much uniformly were getting their kids ready for urban life and careers. I have a lot of stories told to me about German or Irish still being spoken by adults but being discouraged by said adults because they wanted their kids to take a job in the nearby city. The weirdest thing in the world was my Swiss German dad who came to the US in the 80s getting a response in the early 2000s from my Catholic Irish-German great aunt and grandma in broken German as a kid when he said something to me in German and they understood enough to get involved.
As I said in the past, I wonder if the singling out of Catholics will reinforce ethnic identities, especially in opposition to German and Italian volunteers, or if it will see them rededicate themselves to assimilation and being "true Americans" to escape the victimization. I think both will happen to some extent, but I lean towards the assimilationists getting the upper hand for both OTL and ATL reasons. Still, the idea of a Bostonian Plastic Paddy being more fluent in Gaelic than a lot of Ireland residents amuses me. Also, I like the idea of a German American volunteer/official division singing a version of the Heckerlied as they invade Nazi Germany in response to the aid in the Second American Civil War.
Yeah, this is pretty much my interpretation. Smith wants to win the war, and is willing to take the measures necessary to do that if it appeases his allies and defeats his enemies, even if his ideal personal politics are very different.
I'm glad you like the analogy. It's hard to visualize for us in the modern day just how much a person's politics might change a lot with such a cataclysmic event, and while I don't particularly like Stephan Douglass, I do genuinely think if you put him in a position where all of his attempted compromises failed due to the South attacking them, he would have gradually become as radical as the average soldier and Lincoln in terms of hating slavery and wanting it done away with. Smith doesn't hate capitalism, and I don't think he'll do away with it, but he's put in a position where he has to deal with a ton of its excesses directly and that makes him seem more radical than he is, despite his war goal being "Hey, maybe it's bad for the military to coup a democratically elected president". At the end of this, I don't think Smith will be in the same tier as Lincoln or the Founders, but I think he'll be pretty up there regardless.
Separate from that, I'll say I've found a newfound distaste for Hoover in this new update. It was kind of interesting that he supported the Republic at first, but for a man to see the devastation going on after that decision and still be the equivalent of a Copperhead from the first Civil War? Yeah, fuck him.
Really shows that pacifist movements are usually made up of sellouts, enemy sympathizers and deluded fools. With Hoover tarnishing his legacy from his association with this alongside the allegations of DOJ backing.
Good on Wallace getting his chance to shine as a leader during war time. Despite neurosis's and belief, he never wavered in his desire to help those less fortunate than him. I honestly hope he becomes a president in the aftermath of the SACW.
Although I am curious to know what became of his mentor in mysticism Nicholas Roerich? Did he still go on his Manchurian expedition like in OTL, or did he pull the plug on it to involve himself and his family in the war in some capacity?
Religion so thoroughly defined the 1928 campaign that it’s really not comparable to any other election. Utah, notably, gave Smith a surprisingly strong performance. He basically did bad in Protestant precincts and good in Catholic ones.
Smith also has another advantage: Borah, Raskob, and the GOP establishment blew their load. They tried to impeach him and failed. The midterms have already happened. There’s really nothing they can do to get rid of Smith until 1937. Same with Farmer-Labor. Smith knows this and as a result can do whatever he believes is right. For the time being, he has no election to win, for better or for worse. This also means he’s less reliant on Garner to secure favors from Congress.
The Republic also just isn’t socialist. It’s fundamentally skeptical of corporate power and has a heavy leftist bent, but the average Republican is really skeptical of far-left politics. Olsen’s not seriously threatening to beat the Democrats outside of the Midwest, either. So Smith, at least in principle, is right to pursue a moderate course. Keep in mind, the Northeast was most opposed to the New Deal OTL. It responded best to Smith’s urban reformism. It’s also where the majority of the Republic lives.
The problem is the Midwest doesn’t like that and the Midwest is acting more and more like its own country (because in practice it kind of is).
I’ll confess that I never understood why people want to rehabilitate Herbert Hoover. Beyond being a bad President with bad leadership and bad policies, he might’ve done more than anyone before the 60’s to decouple the GOP from civil rights, he ran a vicious campaign attacking Smith for his religion, and to top it off spent most his retirement trying to claw back power.
Basically, whatever Roosevelt did, Hoover found himself opposed to, whether that was the New Deal (including measures he was open to beforehand), or trying to contain Hitler. I see convincing himself of the Peace movement’s crock of nonsense as in character, but I understand if people don’t like this bit.
Yeah, this is why Copperheadism in the Civil War is a favorite niche of mine: the argument feels ridiculously modern, and while it’s easy to see where they’re coming from, it’s also very easy to see the fundamental and unforgivable flaw built into its foundation. Like Orwell said— “pacifism is objectively pro fascism.”
I’m afraid I just don’t know— I hadn’t considered Roerich at all.
That's argument that always entered my mind whenever I watched any series hand out villains redemptions like candy and completely gloss over the atrocities committed by said villains. Examples from personal experience being Fairy Tail, Steven Universe, She-Ra, Rise of Skywalker, and MLP: FIM. Leaving me VERY disillusioned with the ideas like 'redemption' and 'forgiveness'
Also I hope my mentioning of Roerich gives you some ideas.
The other thing is, it's not fun to execute anybody. Everyone's a person, and people are complicated. The thing that a lot of anti-war movements that have landed on the wrong side of history forget is that that's just the nature of warfare, and isn't necessarily a good argument against the cause they're attacking.
Yeah, had not considered that before, but the thing about this timeline that @GaysInSpace and I always say is that God loves it because almost every new variable that gets introduced just seems to work great.
True enough, but that complexity is the beauty of humanity in my view.
It is also a fact that it's human to 'not' view yourself as the bad guy. Unless your this guy:
On the other hand, people tend to forget that it is also human to decide that it makes no sense to support a conflict in the name of something that doesn't seem like it will affect you, or that for all you know it could just be war propaganda to force you to support some harmful or horrible cause.
This is even worse in cases where, instead of seeing the NatCorp side committing atrocities like here, it's all about hypothetical "support me now in my hardline stance in the name of preventing hypothetical future atrocities that could very well be something I just made up to justify my own acts of aggression".
Essentially, what we typically see in cases of "please ignore the fact that I killed a hundred thousand people, let's talk instead about how I hypothetically prevented the deaths of millions by doing so."
Of course, the problem here is that it's not a hypothetical question because NatCorp is already active and committing very egregious atrocities, which makes the pacifist, negotiating stance seem less like a reasonable proposition... and more like the stance of cowardly rats that just want to save their own asses and don't care what happens to all the other people on NatCorp's shit list.
This is even worse in cases where, instead of seeing the NatCorp side committing atrocities like here, it's all about hypothetical "support me now in my hardline stance in the name of preventing hypothetical future atrocities that could very well be something I just made up to justify my own acts of aggression".
Essentially, what we typically see in cases of "please ignore the fact that I killed a hundred thousand people, let's talk instead about how I hypothetically prevented the deaths of millions by doing so."
Of course, the problem here is that it's not a hypothetical question because NatCorp is already active and committing very egregious atrocities, which makes the pacifist, negotiating stance seem less like a reasonable proposition... and more like the stance of cowardly rats that just want to save their own asses and don't care what happens to all the other people on NatCorp's shit list.
Yeah but in that case it can be reasonably argued that they were not hypothetical massacres because the Japanese Empire had already been massacring millions of people before that time. Although it is true that this is generally ignored in favor of pointing out that "we prevented the deaths of millions by launching Downfall."
@GaysInSpace @The Angry Observer The American sections so far are very good.
However, after reading the European sections, I think that the French chapters are too implausible and must be retconned. The number one reason is that by that time Weygand had already been retired and replaced by the more loyal Gamelin - and what happened in TTL America would have certainly made it more likely. Gamelin was very flawed but he would have never done such thing.
Second, German rearmament efforts were already running at full steam IOTL and you cannot just have them faster ITTL. Plus, ITTL they already sent parts of their reserves to NatCorps. So, the Germans are simply not ready to intervene in France in 1936.
However, after reading the European sections, I think that the French chapters are too implausible and must be retconned. The number one reason is that by that time Weygand had already been retired and replaced by the more loyal Gamelin - and what happened in TTL America would have certainly made it more likely. Gamelin was very flawed but he would have never done such thing.
Second, German rearmament efforts were already running at full steam IOTL and you cannot just have them faster ITTL. Plus, ITTL they already sent parts of their reserves to NatCorps. So, the Germans are simply not ready to intervene in France in 1936.
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Through the mid-1930s, the Grrmans were consistently a breath away from completely running out of foreign exchange to procure not just advanced goods, but basic materials and food. Prior to Anschluss, they were at times weeks away from default. The only thing keeping them going was the willingness of British high finance - which was extremely overleveraged and often close to catastrophe itself - to keep doing business with them. There is no universe where German rearmament can actually go faster without Czech-Austrian gold or a fundamental realignment from Stalin, and without either of these any serious destabilization in British banking, either from a premature bout of antifascism or even just the natural ruinous effects of an American collapse - Germany ends up being weaker and more restrained.
Which is funny, actually, because this happens to Japan in this TL. Much of Japan's aggression pre-WW2 was a response to losing Anglo-American export markets for light consumer goods and trying to build an independent heavy industrial and resource sector, as well as excluding Western powers from China, to compensate. Nobody is in a position to stop them. Japanese incentives for aggression are even stronger ITTL, while it's been restrained, while Germany should not have the means to remilitarize the Rhine, but takes half of France. And uhhh actual pro-German sentiment in France was really unpopular, and Petain's whole regime was based on a thin fiction of neutralism and their already having been beaten.
Which is funny, actually, because this happens to Japan in this TL. Much of Japan's aggression pre-WW2 was a response to losing Anglo-American export markets for light consumer goods and trying to build an independent heavy industrial and resource sector, as well as excluding Western powers from China, to compensate. Nobody is in a position to stop them. Japanese incentives for aggression are even stronger ITTL, while it's been restrained, while Germany should not have the means to remilitarize the Rhine, but takes half of France. And uhhh actual pro-German sentiment in France was really unpopular, and Petain's whole regime was based on a thin fiction of neutralism and their already having been beaten.
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